Once you have deployed the Starter Edition, you can take some time to experience the benefits and begin to start noting where you need your company’s cloud roadmap to go next. What are the key things that you, your business, your users, and your operations need to take them to the next level? Many of these will be in the next edition from Cisco, others will require building an integration into a system that is critical such as your ERP environment to enable chargeback. Let’s break the discussion in some key areas:

Compute

Starter Edition works with UCS and vCenter. While Cisco would like to see your entire datacenter filled with UCS and Nexus, we do realize that you may have other vendors on your approved buying list. You may decide you want to leverage your Cloud Portal, Process Orchestrator, and Server Provisioner across a number of computing hardware vendors. We have customers who provision both physical and virtual servers across Cisco and other vendors. It is one of most common heterogeneous integrations that we do. This allows the end user to order compute as a service with little regard to which flavor the physical server is.

Is your organization moving to a cloud model through a well thought out RFP with at least 40 requirements? May I suggest that you rethink this model. The RFP approach with a committee generated wish list may work in some situations, or even be required, but in general the IT shops that really differentiate themselves go Agile for the cloud. What does that mean?

In our business unit we have turned the development of our Cloud Automation platform: Intelligent Automation for Cloud to an Agile development methodology and process. This means when I ask if we will have a certain feature in our 3.1 version, I get an unexpected answer: we won’t know until close to the ship date. Going agile means we work off a backlog of user stories versus a hard and fast set of features that MUST be in the release. We can ship at anytime with the right methodologies in place.

This approach also works for our customers in building their clouds with our software stack. Agile cloud builders have a set of cloud user stories that they are implementing and may release the updated version of the cloud functionality every quarter, or even every 2-3 weeks. When relaying this approach that one of our customers is taking to another customer considering our solution, I could see a twinkle in his eye as he said: I bet that could really help differentiate the value the IT organization provides. He got that right.

We sell to customers who have RFPs and those who look for capabilities, roadmaps, and more importantly an alignment of vision and approach to cloud automation. Many cloud builders look for vendors who will grow with their agile cloud and one that has an open and extensible model to build new use cases with. Why is that of paramount importance? If you think you know what your cloud needs six months from now, good luck. If you bet on the fact that your business and technology requirements will change before you get to your next release of your cloud you will need an agile cloud builder methodology.

Look around in your IT shop. Do you have a single large printout page denoting the graphic of the IT Enterprise Architecture in your company? Does Zachman ring a bell? Do you have Data, Process and Deployment views documented? Do you have an Enterprise Architect?

If you answered YES to most if not all of these then you better take a seat and then throw this all out. Get the biggest shredder you can or just light a match to those artifacts. Big IT architecture is dead. Some would say we the practitioners never really got there. I agree with that. Management turnover and turnover again, ITIL deployments, imploding financial systems and reductions in funding, virtualization that sneaked in the back door, cloud that entered through the front door; this all worked against us in building the perfect system model to live out the decade, let along the most recent fiscal quarter.

If you answered MAYBE or NO to most of those questions, good for you, but be careful. I will explain about that later. Monolithic IT architectures are gone. Do we really have a single version of the truth in that relational database? Probably not. Why is this important? The pace of innovation in the deployment of IT systems to solve real life problems at speed and scale has increased. In some ways we are willing to compromise on those desires for five nines of reliability to get the business results quickly.

Do you still need a well thought out architecture for your deployed systems? Of course! Do you need to design those deployment views for new models of application resiliency, ecosystems of federated data models, and the conclusion that even the CIO’s office can’t really control what the end users do with technology? Absolutely.

Why is this important to you? No matter what part of IT or the business you are in, make a small subtle shift in your psyche. Stop trying to control what you cannot. Focus on the end outcomes, and strive to make your piece of IT process or technology listen to your customers. If you are an architect, go broad, real broad, but focus on the micro-architectures. If you are a technologist, don’t just dwell on the speeds and feeds. Live a few days in the life of your users. Manage the change that occurs through small impactful steps.

In about 2 weeks there will be a great webinar panel discussion on the business and technology architecture concerns in automating your cloud and how to measure the value. Unleashing automation solutions to do what they do best may make or break a company’s IT strategy over the next few quarters as those cloud journeys begin.

The webinar,IT Automation Unplugged, a panel discussion moderated by Glenn O’Donnell of Forrester will indeed be a cool event to listen in to. Not only has Glenn followed this space for many years but he also has some really insightful perspectives on the Journey to Cloud. This webinar has the potential to highlight some really pointed dialog between myself and Brad Adams of rPath, Nand Mulchandani of ScaleXtreme, and Luke Kanies of Puppetlabs. I bet the sparks might fly as we trade our perspectives on the huge demand for private and public clouds and need for enterprises to show value quickly.

This brings me to a great phrase I heard this week from one of our customers. It was used in the context of their employees using their company’s private cloud. It was “High Governance”. It was seriously lacking in their current solution which highly leveraged their virtualization vendor’s software. I probed them on what they meant by “High Governance”. It was mostly around ensuring that individuals that provision services would get access to only the services, cloud data center locations, and specific providers that they are entitled to. While this is not a new concept, the element that grabbed my attention was that IT shops have a strong need for different sourcing strategies based upon end user role, organization, location, and any number of policy settings in their Active Directory or LDAP.

“High Governance” means ensuring that your cloud users get ONLY what they are entitled to in your IT policy. No more generic UIs for generic users or uber UIs for unknown hypothetical users. The cloud is now a strongly governed personal experience, what a novel concept.

I wonder what the panel will think about this. Please attend if you get a chance.

If you missed Cisco Live earlier this month or if you didn’t get a chance to see our Intelligent Automation demos and attend our sessions, you will want to read this blog!

It was the busiest event of the year for Cisco’s Unified Data Center and Unified Management team, with over a dozen breakout sessions and several theater presentations featuring our management software, as well as a call-out in the CTO keynote. Our experts, customers, and partners were actively talking about and demoing our software throughout Cisco Live.

One of our popular demos at the show used Hadoop and Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler to extract data from Twitter with social media activity at the event. This app runs a Hadoop MapReduce job every 5 minutes to track Cisco Live tweets, showcasing workload automation and big data. Check it out here.

The Intelligent Automation for Cloud Starter Edition was another hot demo at the event, with lots of interest from IT departments that want to get started quickly with a private cloud running on Cisco UCS. Check out the recorded demo here and the theater presentation here.

For more Cisco Live highlights, here are some videos featuring some of the Intelligent Automation team, our partners, and customers:

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